D in Ubuntu apps ecosystem

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 26 February 2016 at 09:25:19 UTC, Joseph Rushton 
Wakeling wrote:
> On Thursday, 25 February 2016 at 19:21:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> But can such a powerful phone handle Ubuntu Touch? ;) The 
>> preliminary reviews for the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Edition, which 
>> you're presumably referencing, are not good, even though the 
>> hardware is spec-ed out, because the Ubuntu software is 
>> supposedly slow and laggy.  I was hopeful for the previous 
>> Ubuntu on Android effort years ago, but it never went anywhere.
>>  I bet this one won't either.
>
> Based on my own experience with an Ubuntu phone (it's my daily 
> driver, and I have the least-powerful hardware of the existing 
> commercially released phones), I think that the reviews are 
> just possibly not coming from an unbiased position. ;-)

I don't know that anybody cares about Ubuntu enough to be biased 
against it.  Vlad Savov said he wanted to like it, but couldn't:

http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/23/11097126/meizu-pro-5-ubuntu-edition-specs-price-release-date-mwc-2016

Of course, this is pre-release software and likely a newer 
version of Ubuntu than what you're running, so maybe they'll get 
it all to work well soon, if it did in the past on your phone.

>> Well, it took us a long time to get on the currently most 
>> popular OS platforms, iOS and Android, and we still have no 
>> apps on there, so I don't think this tiny Ubuntu niche will 
>> get much dev effort.  But if you or someone else believes in 
>> and wants to develop for it, more power to you.
>
> Well, if I understand right, the hardest part of the work 
> (making sure things run OK on ARM) has substantially been done 
> by you and others.  Assuming that works, I would anticipate 
> that the major part of the requirements would be the bindings 
> to the Ubuntu SDK.

Mostly others, I just fixed a few ARM bugs here and there: most 
of the code needed for ARM was written by David, Dan, Johannes, 
and others.  Yeah, now that ldc has good codegen for ARM, 
including the Raspberry Pi 
(https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc/issues/1283), all Ubuntu 
should require is OS bindings.

> I do think the Ubuntu offerings are compelling in terms of how 
> they restructure the phone/tablet experience, particularly in 
> terms of how they structure things like the security and 
> permissions models, and the separation between 
> hardware-interaction-layer vs. core OS vs. application space 
> and the prospects there for consistent software deployment (and 
> updates) across many different devices.

Sounds interesting, the Scopes UI seems cool too.  I was mostly 
talking about the small userbase and how it'd be tough to justify 
investing much time into it.  But if someone really wants D on 
there, that'd be great. :)